Bengals Fans: No More Katy Perry

After enraging their fans with a misguided musical choice, the Cincinnati Bengals are calling an audible.

The Bengals—who on Monday unveiled Katy Perry’s megahit “Roar” as a pregame, in-game and postgame song at Paul Brown Stadium—said on Friday that the song will no longer be featured as prominently.

The decision comes after a social-media backlash over the team’s usage of the song—which, as bubblegum pop fare, was an affront to typical football tastes. Fans took to Twitter to complain before the game against the Pittsburgh Steelers was even over.

“I think some fans proved that there’s an expectation that when the team takes the field, there should be more of a hard-rock, classic-rock song and I know that’s what we’re going to do this game,” said Jeff Berding, the Bengals’ director of sales and public affairs. “Katy Perry is not going to be the last song you hear before the team takes the field.”

The Bengals host the Green Bay Packers on Sunday. A representative for Perry didn’t return a message seeking comment.

The move is a win for tradition, but it also is proof of a national problem. Stadium music nationwide is calcified. Most arenas and stadiums play the same songs they have been playing for years, since testosterone-fueled rock is what people expect.

When Mitchell Morgan, a 23-year-old business student in Cincinnati, tried to get pumped up in the stadium’s upper bowl before the game Monday, he braced to bang his head to classic stadium rock fare—Guns N’ Roses, maybe AC/DC. Instead, he heard “Roar,” which—while having some Bengals-oriented lyrics (“I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar”)—is far softer than what he expected.

“I mean, I know what they are going for but it’s not going to work. How can you think you can do something like that without any backlash?” Morgan said. “There were Steelers fans next to me laughing.”

Andrew Watson, a 31-year-old insurance broker who was in section 102 on Monday, looked at his cousin when the song began. “We both kind of looked at each other like, ‘Is that the song they are really playing?’ ” he said. “I would hope they aren’t trying to make it an anthem.”

Jason Patrick, a 34-year-old in sales in section 312, said it was “the running joke of the night.”

“You expect to hear certain things at a football game: ‘Crazy Train’ and basically ‘Jock Jams volume one,’ ” he said, referring to the compilation of stadium staples released in the 1990s. “So we hear this and we’re saying, ‘Uh, is this our new theme song?’ “

Berding, the Bengals employee, said the song was embraced by the game-day entertainment staff, since “the lyrics are sort of on the mark and we thought it was a good song,” he said. “The social media was obviously very negative.”

Berding said three years ago the team decided to diversify its songs and was met with a similar but much-less-visible reaction when they started to play more country music. He said that walking around the stadium on Monday, he didn’t notice any particular disdain for the song—until he checked the Internet.

The song may still be played while fans are filing into the stadium, Berding said. No decision has been made on if it will continue to be a post-victory song.

The song is also featured in the stadium mixes for other tiger-named teams, with little to no fallout. A Detroit Tigers spokesman said the team “will continue to play it at most if not all Tigers home games this season.”

“The good news is…we beat the Steelers, it was a great night,” Watson said. “Other than the song.”